


The Great Escape

by MaybeMayura



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Agreste Family Drama, Gabriel Agreste - Freeform, MamaNath, Miraculous Ladybug - Freeform, Miraculous Side Effects, Miraculous one-shot, Nathalie Sancoeur - Freeform, Sickfic, The Agreste Family, The Miraculous House of Agreste AU, adrien agreste - Freeform, but it's not the whole time, gabenath, gabriel x nathalie - Freeform, mentions of vomit, so be aware, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:13:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24919636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaybeMayura/pseuds/MaybeMayura
Summary: One-shot, set shortly after the events of The Miraculous House of Agreste.Fu's cure for the broken miraculous can't fix everything, and Nathalie is having a difficult time accepting the process of recovery. Driven by feelings of inadequacy and Gabriel's and Adrien's smothering, she attempts to escape the Agreste mansion.The only problem is, she's not exactly thinking straight.Soft GabeNath drabble, because that's what my heart needs.
Relationships: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	The Great Escape

Even though she had long stopped wearing the Peacock miraculous, Nathalie was annoyed to find her problems were far from over.

The best she could figure, Fu’s partial cure had removed the residual magic that had been consuming her body, but it wasn’t on the same restorative level as the power of the miraculous ladybugs. It didn’t fix any of the mental or physical damage she had sustained. As a result, she was left at rock bottom to struggle uphill through recovery on her own.

The most irritating thing was the weight. Having not been able to consistently keep down a solid meal for at least the past month or two, she had mostly given up trying. This meant she had subsisted mainly on coffee and aspirin and light carbohydrates, like bread and tea biscuits, as they didn’t contribute to her nausea. After all, why force it down when it was only going to come back up again? As a result, she had lost several pounds she didn’t need to lose. She constantly felt tired and cold and listless even sitting at her desk, plugging away at administrative tasks in a winter coat as the weather outside continually warmed. (She refused to show up to work in a sweatshirt because she felt it ‘too unprofessional, Gabriel, it’s fine.”)

And she hated it. She had always tried to keep a trim figure, but this was too far. She had started avoiding the mirror when she stepped out of the shower, because her eyes would flick over the more-prominent bones of her hips and ribs and spine, noticing her lack of muscle. She had been an active child—having done martial arts and team sports and whatever else—and had managed to maintain some of that ability into adulthood. Which turned out to be useful, since she worked for a man who created supervillains in his spare time that she had to protect herself from. She was relatively okay with her adult body, and sometimes when she had more time to hit the gym and focus on herself (aka, _not_ fashion week) proud of what she could do. Until now. She hated how thin and tired she looked and felt, how useless. She thought wryly that if this is what it was like being eighty years old, she would rather just die.

Nathalie had figured gaining it all back was going to be easy. That she would just start eating normally and get back into the gym within a few weeks. The day they had come back from Fu’s apartment, newly (partially) cured, she had ordered herself dinner from her favorite restaurant. She was excited, because she actually wanted to eat it all. And she had. And it hadn’t stayed down.

 _Okay,_ she had thought to herself, exiting the bathroom. _We just jumped the gun on this one. It must take some time to really take affect._

She tried again with lunch the next day, and again found herself rushing from the atelier not a half hour later with her hand clapped to her mouth and a hurried “excuse me,” as a response to her boss’s raised eyebrows.

She felt frustration rising as she rinsed out her mouth and leaned over the spotless bathroom counter, squinting in the harsh light at the sharpened edges in her face. She was getting a creeping suspicion that after not having had it consistently for so long, her body didn’t know what to do with real, solid food. But she pushed that thought down, and stubbornly resolved to try again.

The third time it happened, Gabriel threw open the door to the bathroom and rushed to where she was bent over the toilet, violently throwing up what had been dinner. Without a word or a change in expression, he swept her bangs and escaping hairs back from her face as she heaved again and again. He knelt on the floor with her and rubbed her back with his palm as she sobbed in anger and frustration and beat her fists weakly against the seat of the toilet, because she was just _so_ nauseous and _so_ angry with herself and _so_ ready for it all to be over.

Why couldn’t everything just be normal again? There was no miraculous. No blood. Just regular, disgusting, annoying vomiting. She had no clue what to do about it, and he listened as she told him so, with her reddened eyes and smeared mascara and a nose that ran like a river. _Pathetic_ , she thought, and hated herself for letting it get to her, especially in front of him _._ This was like the third time she had cried in front of him _ever_ , and all of them had been within the last week. Just one more thing to add to her new list of weaknesses.

But when she had thoroughly exhausted herself he had just wet a washcloth with cold water for her face, helped her off the floor, and taken her by the shoulders upstairs to the bedroom she now occupied almost full time. She was grateful to him for not making too much of a fuss, but she could still see the worry in his expression as he turned to leave. 

“Stop forcing it. You need to rest,” he said from the doorway as she sat on the bed, holding the cold cloth to her puffy eyes.

“But sir—”

“Gabriel.” He corrected. “I will bring you your tablet if you must _insist_ on working. But you’re staying here for the rest of the day.” And with that, he shut the door, coming back with the tablet and a glass of water within a few minutes without another word.

He returned again a few hours later. She had been feeling better, save a mild undercurrent of nausea and general exhaustion, and had been forced to admit that working from the comfort of a king-sized bed was much improved from her desk. She was relatively content sitting half-curled with her back against the headboard and her tablet on her knees, tucked up under the clean white sheets. She looked up as he entered and moved to stand, but he waved his hand.

“Please don’t.” He cleared his throat, almost looking nervous. “I brought you some frozen grapes.”

“I thought we were out of grapes.” She would know, she was the one who usually made up the grocery order.

“I ordered some and had them delivered with that new online grocery company. They’re good for nausea.” He set the bowl on the nightstand and she hesitantly took one. It took a bit of time to thaw enough to actually chew, but the icy coldness of the fruit juice was not nearly as repulsive to her fragile stomach as the thought of more substantial food. And it forced her to eat slowly.

She raised her eyebrows. “This is…great. How did you know…?”

He pursed his lips and tented his fingers. “It worked for Emilie…”

Oh, no. She didn’t want to hear about the miraculous. She was done with that shit. And Emilie had become something of a sensitive subject between them after a disagreement they’d had one evening that escalated into a row about how even though he had given up the miraculous (which she still felt weird about), he still hadn’t made a decision on what he was going to do about her ‘lying in the basement, Gabriel, it makes me so uncomfortable…’ To which he had shut his door in a rage and refused to come out for hours. At first she felt bad, but Emilie was her friend too, and they all deserved some closure, despite what that would mean…

“…when she was pregnant with Adrien.”

Ah. At least it wasn’t about the miraculous. She nodded, keeping her features neutral.

“Thank you.” He inclined his head and turned to leave.

It was these little things that got to her. Going out of his way to get her grapes. Holding her hair for her. The warm weight of his hand comfortingly running over her back. And others, like when his hands found her shoulders after a long day, or brushed her arm, her hand as they passed each other in the foyer, or even leaving her a little box of macarons from the Dupain-Cheng’s bakery. The passionfruit ones.

Gabriel was…weirdly affectionate in relationships, something she had witnessed bits and pieces of as she had watched his connection with Emilie develop over the years. In actions, not words. It felt odd for it to be directed at her, but it was thrilling all the same. It had started after her half-confession in the car that one day, something she was still embarrassed to think about, but the continuation reassured her that her feelings weren’t completely one-sided. These little things told her he cared without needing to say it out loud, which was fortunate because she knew from experience that as eloquent he could be when he spun monologue after monologue in his lair, all of his mastery with words broke down over the simplest declarations of emotions.

And at the same time it _killed_ her, because she couldn’t let herself reciprocate. She was living in his house, at his request, and it made it so entirely difficult to maintain a working relationship. She would consent to idle touches and little gestures but not kisses, no matter how much she longed to pull his face close and do that again, because _her_ body still lay in that coffin downstairs. She felt so guilty for all the things she had already done. But she told herself that as long as Gabriel still held on to Emilie, she wouldn’t pursue a real relationship. There was no point.

* * *

Everything got exponentially worse when she actually got sick a few days later. She had graduated from frozen grapes to bread as she agonizingly slowly coaxed her stomach back into accepting normal food again. But this time it was her immune system that failed her.

Gabriel and Adrien in turn had been pleading with her to take the day off and go back to bed while she repeatedly intoned to them that she was fine, despite coughs and sniffles and nearly falling asleep at her desk. Her head felt stuffed with that woolly feeling of a probable fever.

Struck out by the common cold. It wasn’t nearly bad as the miraculous, though. She could take it.

An additional source of irritation on her mind was that the two of them weren’t speaking to one another. Adrien because he was angry, Gabriel because he was afraid. But they would both speak to her, and in turn she would relay pertinent information. She sighed at her desk. It was so annoying to do, but it wasn’t like it was that different from before….At least Adrien was back home. She had been worried about him.

It wasn’t until Gabriel walked up to her later that day and put his hands on her shoulders and stared into her face and said it straight out: “Nathalie, _please_ rest, I can’t stand hearing you cough; it’s giving me anxiety,” did she consider doing just that. She blinked, processing. _Oh, how nice, his therapy has finally given him the tools to articulate his feelings,_ she thought absentmindedly. She squinted into his face and those wavering blue eyes.

“How do you think it makes _me_ feel?”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “You’re right. I still think you should go back to bed, though.” She felt a giddiness at the ‘you’re right,’ as it was something she had asked him to start saying and he had surprisingly obliged. With practice, of course. Another one of those little things. 

He managed to get her up to her bedroom and into comfier clothes, with the television showing some god-awful Netflix sitcom before she quite registered what was going on.

“Gabriel, wait, I told you I’m fine. I need my tablet; I have to schedule you a meeting with that client for tomorrow—”

“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’ and shut the door in her face. The sitcom played a pre-recorded laugh track. She growled and sniffed as she hit the power button and the TV blinked off.

She wasn’t going to let him treat her like an invalid for the second time in a week. She had had enough assaults to her pride as of late. Good god, she had _cried_ in front of him on his freaking bathroom floor.

She looked down at herself. She was wearing a tee shirt that wasn’t hers and was far too big, and a pair of leggings that were. The shirt smelled like Gabriel, a fact she would ordinarily be pleased about. Suddenly chilly, she located her blazer and pulled it over top of the shirt. It occurred to her that she hadn’t brought much casual wear over from her apartment.

Her apartment. Of course! She would just go home, where she would _finally_ be left alone. She just needed to grab her tablet.

Slipping her heels back on, she descended the staircase, senses on as high alert as they could be considering the cottony feeling in her head. She gently opened the door to the atelier and tiptoed to her desk to retrieve the device.

Just as she picked it up, her nose tickled. She sneezed sharply into her elbow. Her sinuses felt like they were going to explode.

An “Ohh, _no_ you don’t!” from behind her made her spin around in surprise. Adrien was standing at the entrance of the room with his arms and legs open in a wide ‘x’, blocking the doorway. She relaxed when she saw that it was not Gabriel and walked towards the teenager with what she hoped was an authoritative stride.

“Ah, Adrien. Let me through, I was just heading out.” 

He shook his head. “Nuh uh. You’re supposed to be in bed.”

She narrowed her eyes, fighting the tickle of another sneeze. “And how do you figure that?”

He averted his gaze. “I, uh, well…I kind of…listened at the door? When father was with you a few minutes ago.” He smiled sheepishly. She gave him a look. “Anyways, it doesn’t matter. Give me the tablet and go back upstairs.” He straightened up and held out his hand. She paused and looked at his hand, her fingers tightening their hold. “I’ll tell father if you don’t.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re not talking to him.”

“Try me.” He waggled his eyebrows. She hated when he got like this. It was so reminiscent of someone else.

The standoff lasted a mere ten seconds before she caved.

“Fine.” She gave in to his mischievous stare, placing the tablet in his outstretched hand harder than necessary, and strode up the staircase in a show of dignity without a backward glance.

Once on the other side of the closed door, she sneezed again and sighed. As much as she loved that child, she wasn’t about to just obey him, no matter how grown up he acted sometimes.

Forget the tablet. She was going to get out and take the train to her apartment and finally, _finally_ be alone.

Crossing to the window, she eyed the distance from the ledge to the ground. Nothing her bedsheets couldn’t handle. Somewhat in a daze, she stripped the mattress and tied its contents end-to-end. She looped one end around the post of the heavy bedframe and heaved to push open the window.

 _Wheee._ Spots danced in her vision from the effort. She shook herself and began lowering herself down the side of the building.

Once her feet touched the ground, she knelt and took a minute to breathe properly. Perhaps…this wasn’t a great idea, as she was feeling rather light-headed. But she was committed now. She was going to get home.

* * *

Gabriel pushed open the door some minutes later, a tray in his hands.

“Nathalie, I’m not the greatest cook, but— _Nathalie?_ ” It took him only a second as he set the tray on the dresser to scan the room and find the open window with the knotted sheets.

“Nathalie! _What the…?_ ” He slapped a hand to his face and groaned. “What the fuck does she think she’s _doing_?” He said aloud to no one in particular.

The patter of running feet came from the doorway and Adrien entered. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed it again. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

“Go get the Gorilla and get in the car; we have to find her before she does something stupid,” Gabriel said to his son through gritted teeth as he brushed past. Adrien shrugged and did as such. His father conceding speaking to him first was an interesting development.

The three of them were situated in the car in record time. Gabriel slid into the passenger seat and shut the door. “The front gate is open. She probably used the car remote. Either of you have any idea where she would have headed?” His voice betrayed the barest quiver of worry.

“Home, probably,” Adrien said quietly from the backseat. “She was trying to take her tablet with her.” His father’s eyes found his briefly in the rearview mirror, then looked away.

“Thank you. You know where to go,” he said to the chauffer, who made no response except a foot pressed to the gas pedal.

* * *

Nathalie was most of the way to the metro station before she realized she didn’t have the keys to her building. She didn’t have an I.D., nor did she have a train ticket; she didn’t have anything except what she was wearing on her body.

She sat down on a bench a few blocks from the Agreste property near the banks of the Seine and put her head in her hands, trying to catch her breath. She was dizzy and feeling very…helpless. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea. What was she thinking?

A car pulled up beside her, and her head snapped up. The window rolled down and Gabriel’s face appeared at the same time the rear door opened and Adrien jumped out.

“Thank goodness we found you! We’ve been looking for over a half an hour,” he said, grabbing her arm and helping her up. “Father was worried,” he whispered in her ear. She frowned at him in confusion.

“I thought you two weren’t in communication.”

The corner of Adrien’s mouth twitched. “Not really. I can just tell, you know.” He steered her into the backseat of the car with more force than she thought was necessary and closed the door after her, running around to the other side. She hazarded a glance at Gabriel in the mirror. He didn’t look happy. She sighed in defeat and let her head fall back against the seat, resigning herself to a royal beratement once the short return drive was over. The tickle of a cough rose in her throat, and she swallowed, not wanting to break the heavy silence.

When they arrived back at the Mansion Agreste, she opened her own door and got out to find Gabriel already there. She was momentarily puzzled before he bent, and in one motion that made her head swirl she found herself upside down over his shoulder. She squeaked in surprise.

“Put me down! _Gabriel!_ ” She weakly beat her fists against his back, feeling the swaying rhythm of his steps as he ascended the front stairs.

“Not a chance. I’ve decided that by running away without seemingly _any_ use of logical thought—which is utterly uncharacteristic of you, Miss Sancoeur—that you’ve forfeited the right to be left by yourself.” His gruff voice held an undercurrent of amusement. She grumbled.

Adrien watched this proceed with his hands over his mouth to stifle his giggles. He had never seen Nathalie like this before, and he found the subversion of the assistant’s usual powers quite amusing.

Once across the threshold and out of Adrien’s earshot she stopped hitting him, instead pressing her forearms against his back so she could lift her head to glare in the direction of her captor’s face.

“I’m going to kick your ass,” she said, without much conviction. She certainly had a nice view of it. The pressure in her sinuses had increased from being thrown upside down in such a fashion, and she was losing energy.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I mean it. I have work to do.”

“And so do I when I say you don’t, and that if you refuse to stay here, I’m staying with you.” He stooped to get them both through the doorway to his bedroom, since her bed was currently missing its sheets. Once inside he bent his knees so she could slide down from his shoulder, and her hands may have lingered a little too long on his chest, but she wasn’t about to care.

“Don’t you have work to do?” She asked hopefully, straightening his lapel. He brushed past her towards the door.

“I cleared my schedule.”

“Only I can do that.”

“I am an adult, and your boss, you know.” He gave her a hard look. “Now don’t move. I’ll only be gone a minute.” The cough she had been holding in finally let loose, rendering her unable to respond whether she wanted to or not.

When he returned, he held a tray that contained a bowl of soup and some saltine crackers, now considerably cooler than it had been initially. He set it on his nightstand, and his face softened at the sight of her standing there eyeing him, his shirt loose on her frame and tucked messily into her suit jacket. Sick, and a mess, and utterly…something.

“Now sit.” He put his hand on her shoulder and forced her down to the edge of the bed. She bit her lip.

“I’m an adult too, you know,” she said with a touch of defiance, only it was ruined by the nasally undertone of congestion setting in.

“Then stop acting like a child,” he said with a rising intensity, easing her arms out of her blazer for the second time.

“I will if you stop fucking treating me like one.” She yanked her arms back and hugged them to herself. Their eyes met in mutual frustration. Her mouth was set. He breathed a long breath out through his nose and straightened up to his full height.

“Listen, if you’re going to not tell me what you need when you need it, fine. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and let you not listen to your body, either. I’m not letting you run yourself into the ground again. It happened before when I was blind to it—” his eyes shifted to the side a moment before they found hers again “—and I can’t _bear_ the thought I have every single day that I let you do that. So please just _shut up_ and let me _help_ you.” He sat down heavily on the side of the of the bed adjacent to hers and pushed his hands up under his glasses to rub his eyes.

Nathalie was shocked into silence. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He had finally used some of those words he was good at, though maybe not in the way she had expected. She slumped in defeat.

“I’m…sorry,” she mumbled, and promptly sneezed again. He stood up and retrieved the tray in acknowledgement as she shifted to recline against his ornate wooden headboard.

“I’m not a good cook in the slightest, but it’s hard to mess up soup. I figured it would be light enough for your stomach.” His tone was gentler for a second before some of the hardness crept back in. “And then I came upstairs, and you weren’t there. So now, as consequence, you have to eat it no matter how horrible it is.”

He set it in her lap and she sized up the contents of the bowl. Chicken and vegetables, probably. He grabbed the television remote and flopped down on the bed, flicking through Netflix again.

“Now, what should we watch?”

Nathalie tried the soup. It wasn’t bad. Just perhaps not as warm as it may have originally been. She figured he was probably right about her self-sacrificing tendencies. And she really wasn’t feeling too good…or acting with any sort of logic, it seemed.

“It doesn’t matter to me.” She had a few more spoonfuls of soup and a cracker before placing the tray back on the nightstand. She yawned. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to take a nap.”

“That’s right, you are,” Gabriel muttered, leaning back and closing his eyes as well.

He was glad she had finally seen some sense. Although the events of the day had been trying, he was struck by the thought that for her, he would do it again a thousand times over.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! 
> 
> As I write the sequel (whee!), there's a bunch of gaps during the intermediate time that I feel need to be filled, so this one-shot will hopefully become part of a series!! (And not to be a self-promo hobo but if you haven't already checked out The Miraculous House of Agreste, have a look!) This is just some softness as the two of them (and Adrien!) make sense of their new, uh, arrangements? Anyways. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed and please feel free to leave thoughts or constructive criticism if the mood strikes you.


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